Cox Fleet: Consolidating a mobility brand under a single digital home

Cox Automotive runs one of the largest networks of automotive brands in North America, and rtCamp has managed 10+ of those brand sites across a six-year engagement. Within that portfolio sits the mobility business, the part of Cox that keeps commercial fleets running.

As Cox Automotive’s Fleet business grew over the years, the brand experience became fragmented with time. For example, fleet managers landed on FleetNet America for some services, Cox Fleet Services for others, Cox Fleet Solutions as a confused entry point, and a /mobility section on coxautoinc.com that overlapped with all three. No single property gave visitors the whole picture.

So Cox Automotive made a strategic call: acquire the coxfleet.com domain, retire the older sites, and build one cohesive home for the entire mobility business. Their in-house creative agency, Ideabar, prepared Figma designs across 20+ unique page templates. rtCamp partnered with Cox’s marketing team to translate that vision into a production-grade WordPress site on WordPress VIP, set up as a microsite within the existing Cox multisite.

The project ran on a tight nine-week window with several moving parts, where each of those parts is its story.

The project at a glance

Issue	Solution	Business outcome
Nine-week deadline for 20+ Figma templates and self-service needs.	Imported Cox Block Library and built new blocks for the design.	Page build time for editorials dropped from 3 days to 2 hours.
Scattered resources across multiple legacy sites and post types.	Consolidated taxonomies and migrated content via XML importer.	246 resources centralized with instant filtering.
Retiring legacy sites without breaking SEO or inbound links.	Implemented server-level regex and one-to-one redirects on VIP.	Preserved SEO equity with zero broken links.
Difficulty filtering services across 30+ regional markets.	Built a D3 TopoJSON interactive map with taxonomy-driven filters.	Faster service discovery for customers across all devices.

A theme built on a library that already worked

To build a new WordPress site, a custom theme that follows Cox Automotive’s branding had to be set up. When the new theme work began, Cox already had a component block library that rtCamp helps maintain across 8+ Cox properties. The first decision the Cox team made was deliberate: do not fork, rebuild, or bypass it; import it as a WordPress plugin dependency and extend it where coxfleet.com’s design genuinely needed something new.

That single decision shaped the rest of the build. Most of the 20+ Figma templates fell into place using existing blocks with minor configuration tweaks (typography, color palette, line height) handled through global theme settings.
Four new blocks were built specifically for the coxfleet.com delta, each solving a concrete UX need the shared library did not yet cover:

• Modal: displays content in a modal overlay, used on hero sections where a play button needs to surface a video without leaving the page.
• Navigation Filter: tabbed navigation that swaps content sections in place, used on the What We Offer page to organize multiple service categories without page reloads.

• Shop Details: displays a shop location’s address, hours, services offered, and contact details on regional detail pages.
• Region/State Map Filter: the interactive US map that drives regional discovery, covered in detail later.

Patterns took the rest of the theme development load. The team registered a fresh set of reusable patterns with default copy and placeholder imagery, tuned to coxfleet.com’s design language. Marketing now spins up a new page by dropping in the right patterns, replacing the copy, images, and shipping. Pages that could take 2 to 3 days of development now take roughly 2 hours of content work.

These patterns gave Cox marketing velocity on the new site. But the new site was able to absorb everything worth keeping from the old ones.

Three content libraries folded into one resource hub

The mobility brands had accumulated a fragmented collection of case studies, white papers, and testimonials stored across separate custom post types on legacy sites like FleetNet America and Cox Fleet Services. This fragmentation created a disjointed experience for readers and forced the editorial team to manage content across mismatched taxonomies, resulting in poor search experience for readers.

The true engineering challenge laid in taxonomy reconciliation, which required a meticulous audit of every categories, post types and terms from these legacy properties to map them into a cohesive new structure. 

With the help of the Cox team, these complex mappings were finalized and stored in a spreadsheet. Then rtCamp migrated these content types into a single, unified Resources post type using WordPress’s native XML export and import tools, preserving all critical and media references.

The architecture was deliberately lightweight:

• A vanilla JavaScript layer handles filter changes by firing asynchronous fetch requests to a custom WordPress endpoint and swapping the returned HTML partials into the results container.
• The History API (pushState) keeps the URL in sync with the filter state, which makes every filtered view deep-linkable and shareable.
• On initial page load, query parameters in the URL are read first, so a shared link reproduces the same filtered state without an extra round trip.
• The same pipeline powers pagination and “Load More” requests.

Behind the JavaScript, ElasticPress integrates with WP_Query (via ep_integrate => true). This approach translates multiple active filters into a boolean query that runs against Elasticsearch rather than MySQL, ensuring the new site primary database is unburdened from running complex, high-volume search and filter queries.

This architectural approach ensured that migrating the content was only the second step; the next was implementing a robust system to ensure every legacy URL successfully found its way to the new digital home.

Sunsetting four sites without breaking the web

Four legacy properties were lined up to redirect into coxfleet.com: FleetNet America, Cox Fleet Services, Cox Fleet Solutions, and coxautoinc.com/mobility. That consolidation could have broken thousands of inbound links and wasted years of accumulated SEO value.

The unified team utilized the previously mentioned spreadsheet to identify obvious pattern mappings and verify redirect targets for remaining paths. This implementation was subsequently executed across two distinct layers:

• Regex-driven redirection: Consistent URL structures, such as transforming learning-center/post-slug into resources/post-slug, were converted into regex patterns. These were then integrated using the native redirect capabilities of WordPress VIP.
• One-to-one mappings for the long tail, are handled through the same VIP redirect functions.

Server-level redirects perform faster than plugin-based redirects, scale better under load, and avoid the per-request database overhead that turns a redirect plugin into a performance liability at high traffic. The full redirect map was tested on staging environments that mirrored production before any source site went offline.

With the legacy URL transitions completed, SEO equity for the old resources were preserved with zero broken links.

Helping fleet managers find services in their region

Cox Fleet operates across 32 regional markets in the United States, with around 12 physical shop locations sitting under those regions. The previous mobility sites had no clean way to filter services or shops by region. A fleet manager in Nashville could not quickly see what was nearby, and the marketing team could not surface regional offers without manual landing pages.

The new design by IdeaBar proposed an interactive map that grouped states into regional zones and let users drill into specific service centers. This was the most novel piece of the entire build, and rtCamp made a deliberate move to de-risk it before any production code was written.

rtCamp engineers built a quick AI-assisted proof of concept of the map interaction, walked Cox’s marketing team through it for UX approval, and locked the interaction model in a single review.

Modeling regional hierarchy

With the interaction confirmed, the unified team turned to the content model. Each regional page also had associated shop locations, and the URL structure needed to put the region in the slug followed by the shop location. A flat custom post type would not have held that hierarchy cleanly, so the team modeled it as listed below:

• A hierarchical custom post type called Regions and Shops, with state-level service pages as parents and shop locations nested as children.
• A Map Regions taxonomy groups states into the five operational zones that Cox uses (West Coast, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, and South).
• A state taxonomy maps each shop and service to its actual geography. For example, customers can easily navigate to Cincinnati, Dayton if they’re interested in that area.
• A services offered taxonomy, flat and tag-style, so common services are managed in one place and assigned wherever relevant.

This hierarchy delivered URLs that read naturally and breadcrumbs that match how users navigate. Cox can add new regions or shops as the business expands without any schema rework.

A lightweight, taxonomy-driven interactive map

The map itself is where the engineering decision got interesting. The team deliberately avoided heavier GIS frameworks like Leaflet or MapLibre. The requirement was taxonomy-driven filtering, not full geospatial functionality, and pulling in a GIS library would have meant carrying weight the project did not need. Instead, the map was built as a lightweight SVG visualization using D3 with topojson-client and us-atlas for rendering US geographic boundaries.

Regions and states render as SVG paths generated from TopoJSON data, with D3 click handlers attached to each region element. The Map Regions and States taxonomies in WordPress hold the mapping between geographic selections and the corresponding region and shop landing pages.

When a user clicks a region, the selected taxonomy values update in the client-side filter state, URL query parameters synchronize via pushState, and an asynchronous fetch refreshes the filtered service cards below the map without a page reload. 

The map handoff reuses the same pipeline that powers resource filtering elsewhere on the site: direct filter selections, map clicks, and shared URLs all hit the same code path. The map is, in architectural terms, a visual filter controller layered on top of the existing taxonomy-based search system rather than a standalone GIS application.

Prioritizing UX over geolocation

Furthermore, the original design also called for the browser’s geolocation API to auto-detect a user’s location and surface their nearest services. rtCamp recommended otherwise.
The concern was simple: most B2B users decline location prompts, and the prompt itself can feel intrusive on a corporate site. The team’s first proposal was a fallback in which a default region would load if permission were denied. Cox’s marketing team weighed both options and decided the prompt itself was the friction worth removing. The unified team aligned on the new recommendation plus a manual state dropdown as the primary discovery path, with no permission prompt and no silent failure mode.

The regional pages did the discovery job. Every one of them ends with a contact form, and every submission has a destination to reach.

Lead capture that reaches the right sales rep

The regional pages drive lead generation, and every form submission needs to land in Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud so it can reach the right sales rep without lag. Earlier Cox integrations had used Zapier as a middleware layer, which added cost, latency, and one more dependency that could fail.

rtCamp had already built a standard Gravity-Forms-to-SFMC integration for the wider Cox portfolio years earlier, used across every Cox brand site. coxfleet.com plugs into the same integration with no rework.

When something goes wrong, the integration is built to survive:

• Submissions are saved locally in WordPress first, so no lead is lost if the API call to Salesforce fails.
• An email alert fires to the marketing team when a sync fails, surfacing problems early rather than letting them go quiet.
• A retry mechanism re-attempts the sync, so a transient Salesforce outage does not become a missing lead.

Cox’s sales team gets the same lead-capture reliability they already trust on every other Cox brand site, with no new integration to commission or maintain.

Performance designed for the long run

Pagespeed metrics, on desktop, currently show a 0.8s FCP, 0.9s LCP, and a CLS of 0.007. As coxfleet.com is a new site, there were no legacy benchmarks to improve upon; instead, the focus was on establishing a high-performance baseline from the start.

The Cox team established a forward-looking requirement: create an architecture where performance scales alongside site growth rather than diminishing as content expands.

rtCamp deliberately avoided introducing custom cache invalidation logic. Standard WordPress APIs (WP_Query, taxonomy queries, archive rendering) trigger WPVIP’s built-in page, object, and query cache invalidation automatically when:

• Service or shop posts are created, updated, or published.
• Taxonomy relationships change.
• Map Regions, States, or Services Offered taxonomy terms are edited.
• New shop entries are added, and their parent archive pages update.

Writing custom purge hooks or manual Memcached management would have added complexity without measurable benefit. The discipline of using standard APIs everywhere rather than reaching for custom queries that bypass the cache is what makes the platform’s built-in caching layer effective.

A few other decisions were held throughout the build:

• Using ElasticPress allows complex filter combinations to be handled efficiently by Elasticsearch rather than MySQL.
• Images use lazy loading throughout the site.
• Page caching and CDN delivery run at the WordPress VIP platform level, with no per-site configuration overhead.

The architecture is built to absorb growth, not just launch-day load. As Cox publishes more case studies, expands into new regions, or runs traffic-heavy campaigns, performance holds without rework.

The impact of a unified mobility presence

With the launch of coxfleet.com, Cox Automotive’s mobility sector finally possesses a unified digital identity. This consolidation allows fleet managers to locate services within seconds, while the marketing team can now deploy new regional content in a matter of hours. Furthermore, lead data began streaming into Salesforce on the first day, requiring no additional integration efforts.

Additionally, the most significant achievement is the structural efficiency gained. By leveraging existing assets from the broader Cox portfolio—the shared block library, Resources post type, and the established Gravity Forms-to-SFMC integration; the project demonstrated the power of architectural consolidation. The result was a rapid nine-week build that avoided the burden of maintaining custom integrations and introduced new patterns that enhance the shared library for future brand launches.

Cox Automotive has successfully established the mobility presence it envisioned, supported by a brand site built on a reliable and proven foundation.